"Rudy Rucker - Freeware" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rucker Rudy)

"You choke him to death? You just snuff him pronto?" asked Xlotl. Each moldie based its
speech patterns on some different database. While Andrea had filled herself with science
writing, Xlotl had steeped himself in hard-boiled detective novels and gangster film noirs.
"By no means," said Andrea. "The goal is to render him unconscious so that you can
operate on his brain. During the interval that you are constricting his throat, you must
monitor his pulse, taking care that it does not become too slow or too irregular. Allow him
to respire small amounts of air as needed. Meanwhile you elongate your tendril and insert
its tip into his left nostril."

"Eeew," said Monique. "Guh-ross. I mean like what's in his nose?" She had modeled her
speech on the bubbly, questioning Valley Girl slang of the late-twentieth century. They
were hovering on the thermals off the cliffs north of Santa Cruz, all three of them snapped
into pelican mode, talking in the shrill, compressed chirps of encrypted sound that moldies
could use to speak with each other. The moldies were like great birds, squawking high
above the crawling, wrinkled seaтАФyet to each other, they sounded like people talking.

"One of the weakest spots in a flesher's skull is the upper nasal sinus," old Andrea
explained. "Adjacent to the ocular orbit. This is where you must punch through with your
tendril. At this point you will have free access to his brain. And you give him a thinking
cap."
"Gripes! A brain control!" exclaimed Xlotl.

"Your thinking cap will live in his skull like the pith on a nut in its hull," said Andrea,
cackling and flapping her wings. "The cap functions as an I/O port or like an internal
uvvy. Once he has your thinking cap, the cheeseball is your peripheral device."

"This sounds totally hard, Andrea," said anxious Monique. "I'd be freakin'. What if I don't
choke him enough? And then I'm all 'Where's the weak spot?' I am so sure. And how am I
supposed to know how to like hook a thinking cap into some pervo flesher's brain?"

"Come close, children," said Andrea. "I can give you copies of the full specs for a human
brain interface. Make a physical contact with me for direct transmission."
The three soaring pelicans brushed wings, and Andrea downloaded a petabyte of
information to each of the younger moldies. Thanks to the conductive polymers which
filled their plastic tissues, moldies could communicate electromagnetically as well as by
sound.
"Andrea, have you ever really done it? Tell me true," sang Monique after storing the info.

"Yes, I have given thinking caps to two cheeseballs in the past," said Andrea. "I refer of
course to Spike Kimball and Abdul QuayoomтАФof whom I have often spoken. As my
servants, these men left their families and their old lives. All of their assets and
possessions were liquidated, with the full proceeds being given to me. By use of these
resources, I have been able to purchase rejuvenation treatments as well as to buy the
imipolex necessary to bring you and Xanana into the world, Monique."

Spike Kimball had been a muscular Mormon missionary who'd asked Andrea for sex
three years ago, and Abdul Quayoom had been an Islamic rug programmer who'd
approached Andrea three years before that. If they'd been smarter, instead of trying to
have sex with Andrea, they would have burned her in a puddle of alcohol.